Noel Whittall

The language in this collection is the language of a man who looks at the world from a different angle, a man who infuses mundane situations with his grand, sparkling poetic sensibilities. The poems in ‘Speak Another Language’ range in scope and tone: from the hat shops of New York, the Piccadilly Line in London, the ‘hard hills’ of Airedale to the late bus to Leeds. These poems are a fusion of whimsy, nostalgia and lyricism in which Whittall ear-wigs on a conversation in Morrisons’ café, mourns the loss of the old fashioned ‘real’ chip shops whose ‘ceilings are garnished with cracks’, muses querulously on IKEA’s bundles of decorative hearth-side sticks, provides us with some delightful forgotten fragments of history and takes us on a rich olfactory motorcycle tour to the ‘thin world around the edge of everywhere’.